Mrs. Alzina Parsons Stevens, born in Maine somewhat before the middle of the last century, began in early childhood to work in a cotton-mill. On her thirteenth birthday her right hand was caught in the machinery and a finger disabled for life. The quivering, terrified child was treated by a company surgeon, who brutally amputated a part of her finger without using any anææsthetic. Nor was any member of her family called, though they lived near by and a brother or sister would gladly have come to stay with her. More than forty years afterward, a little while before her death, Mrs. Stevens said to the writer: "If my interest in the cause of organized labor had ever flagged, if I had ever been in danger of growing discouraged, the sight of that poor finger and the memory of the horror of that day would have been spur enough." Of great native intelligence, the little millgirl read everything that came in her way, and years afterward, learned the printer's trade and proof-reading. She was among the first women admitted to the printers' union in Chicago. Later, as editorial writer for the Toledo Bee, she was a Knight of Labor, and while editor and part owner of the Vanguard founded a "Federal Union" composed of women from different occupations. As Assistant State Factory Inspector of Illinois, appointed in 1893, Mrs. Stevens served the cause of working women and children with head, heart, and undaunted spirit.

I have enumerated thus briefly the varied activities of Mrs. Stevens because they illustrate the difficulties which beset women in trade unions. She remained in the cotton-mill only long enough to learn the trade, to take part in a strike of the futile sort characteristic of unorganized girls and children, to suffer mutilation irreparable and lifelong. Then she worked her way into higher occupations.

As editorial writer she served the trade union movement with great versatility. Her pen was unfailing in the service of blacklisted employees, of pickets arrested for ignoring Federal injunctions (objects of her liveliest abhorrence), of strike leaders arrested on charges subsequently dismissed (but not until after the strike had been broken) for want of evidence. No one was ever more patient with ignorance, folly, and even dishonesty in inexperienced officials of the unions. For she never forgot that

every union must find its recruits among whatever men, women, and children the employers bring into the industry, whether, like herself, Americans of Pilgrim ancestry, or negro strike-breakers imported under false representations to live in pens in stockyards under protection of armed Pinkerton men. With equal zeal she labored with Russian Jewish garment workers from sweatshops and with little primary school girls doing their first work in biscuit bakeries.

All told, Mrs. Stevens's service to the unions from within their ranks while actually working at her trade formed, perhaps, . a scant thousandth part of her whole service to them as editor, speaker, volunteer organizer, advocate of the union label, and interpreter to the public at large of their aims and methods.

The essential point is that, though women marry out of their trade, though they work up just as men do, though they commonly do not form stable unions (because the individual units of the unions do not stay in one trade), yet, once enlisted, they stay in the movement.

A wife who had been a member of a union before her marriage simply could not urge her husband to break a strike. Rather would she see her children hungry. For, as such a mother said to the writer during a strike of cloak-makers, "Now our living children are hungry, and Hymie is dead for want of the right food in his illness. But if we lose this strike wages will go lower yet; then thousands of children will be hungry and hundreds will die like Hymie. It is better we suffer longer now, and have it over, and win the strike."

The individual union composed of women alone is shifting and unstable, often dissolving and reconstituting itself. Unions of men and women are stronger because men stay far more than women. But the union movement does not lose the allegiance and active help of women who have been organized as girls.

Women are in industry to stay. Their numbers are increasing with bewildering rapidity. In the interest of the public health and morals it is indispensable that they be organized for the protection of their hours of work, their wages, the treatment accorded them in the work-room, and their influence upon the condition of industry as purchasers of the products.

Such are the considerations that have led to the formation of the Women's Trade Union League.

The first effort of the League on a National scale is to get from Congress provision for a thorough investigation of the work of women, embracing not only wages and hours of work, but dangerous occupations, sanitary conditions and surroundings, the extent to which married women are working, and the comprehensive question, concerning both those who are in unions and those who are not, in what degree of health and comfort their wages enable women wage-workers to live.

Outlook. 91: 994-6. April 24, 1909.

Work of Wives. Flora McDonald Thompson.

A decision lately made in the General Sessions Court in New York City has raised the question, Are wives supported by their husbands? A man brought into court on a complaint of having abandoned his wife because, as he said, he could not support a household on his earnings of six dollars a week, was discharged by the judge, who concluded his decision with the admonition, "Let the wife go to work for her living."

It is a popular American notion that the work wives do in the household is not really work. Women so engaged are not counted in United States Labor Reports as being "in industry;" in the United States Census Reports they appear as having no occupation. The whole matter of their situation, as determined for all practical purposes, is neatly set forth by an American political economist thus:

"Only a minority of the population which inhabits the country is actually engaged in economic production. The general rule is that a laborer has a wife and family. The former is lending him material aid by cooking his food and mending his clothes, but there is no need of complicating the matter by considering her as a separate agent of production."

Let us see whether or not that which the wife produces in the home comes within the scope of economic production. What

is she doing there? At a glance, we discern that she is producing things which are actually articles of commerce-manufactured food, manufactured clothing, and that supreme work of domestic art, a poor imitation of which is marketed in hotels, lodging and boarding houses-comfort. Moreover, as buyer for the family and administrator of the family funds, she is performing services as distinctly and essentially related to the production of wealth as any similar work done by men in business houses. But this is not the full extent of the contribution she makes to the wealth of the Nation. She bears children; that is to say, she produces labor.

Wives employed in the home engage in two separate and distinct forms of production-one is purely industrial in character and differs not at all from the production in which men engage: the other is the unique work of women-child-bearing; and the product is, labor. Marriage, therefore, so far from placing wives in the category of a "great majority of the population of a country who are not actually engaged in economic production," confers upon women a dual power in production: wives produce wealth the same as men do, and besides they produce the most indispensable of the requisites of wealth, labor.

It is quite true that the American wife is not regarded as a "separate agent of production," and what are the consequent conditions of her work as compared with conditions of the labor of women wage-earners?

It has been established by law in most civilized countries that the maximum amount of time a woman shall be required to work in industry-work for wages-is sixty hours per week; in the home, the wife, because she works for nothing-or shall one say for love?-may be forced to toil, day after day, all day long, far into the night, and all night, if the convenience of the family shall so be served. The law requires that the shop or factory where women work for wages shall conform to certain standards of health and physical well-being; in consideration of the woman's particular physical needs, she must be provided with a seat so that she may rest properly even while at work, and any occupation deemed threatening to her life is forbidden her. The sanitary condition of the home, the wife's workshop, is a matter of

no public concern; every man's home is his castle; the work done there is his personal affair; the rest of the world may mind its own business. If the wife work in the home in foul air, bending over a wash-tub all day and nursing a sick child all night, that is a family matter; science does not apply here, and here remedial legislation has no mission. By law in England and by custom in France it is decreed that a woman engaged in industry shall not return to work for one month after confinement; the wife at work in a home in the United States may be compelled to resume her accustomed labor the day after, or two or three days after, confinement, and it is to nobody's interest to prevent her. Yet the woman's body is the same; the strain upon her maternity is the same; the burden of her task may be greater in the home than if she labored in industry; and her contribution to wealth is worth money: but because of the sanctity of the home-such sanctity! such homes!—the situation of the wife's labor is ignored on principle; no record is made of the profit and losses of her production; and if the health, happiness, and even the life of the wife go to balance the account, the assumption is that this is quite right and proper; it is a fine instance of the beautiful spirit of devotion to duty which makes wives and mothers toiling in the home so eminently fit to die and go to heaven.

In Great Britain the employment of wives in industry has lately received special attention. In the Government report for the year 1906 on factories and workshops, the Principal Lady Inspector states that the employment in industry of married women is rapidly on the increase, and that, as asserted by many of the women, this is not because these women need to work (at wageearning), but because they prefer it to housekeeping.

"Throughout the year," says the Principal Lady Inspector, "I have given special attention to the question of the employment of married women. In nearly all the towns visited, from a quiet cathedral town to a large manufacturing city, I obtained the same information, namely, that the employment of married women is rapidly on the increase. A mother suffering from lead-poisoning, visited by me in her home, acknowledged that her husband was in good employment, that there was no need whatever for her to seek a job as was her custom at the factory, and said, 'I do